Adobe are not known for their speed at releasing bug fixes. Given that LR5 was released with quite a number of bugs, despite a beta phase, you can perhaps understand their reluctance to rush out fixes.

Over the last few years I've been working with small teams who have development cycles measured in days rather than months, but I suspect LR is too big (code size and team size) to do that safely. God forbid that they should move to Agile Development methods, which have led to some of the worst and most poorly documented code I've ever had to endure.

In my (limited) experience, "Agile Development" tends to result in self-fulfilling metrics that "prove" how good it is, but often poor code and documentation: "the code is documented by the user requirements and test procedures". This meets immediate goals, but once the team disperses the code base is almost unmaintainable. All to often, the user requirements are created by hot-house methodology (for which read "hot head"). Requirements are written in a form that leave users or customers bewildered, and which makes it their fault when the resulting product doesn't meet their real requirements.

In it's defence, Lightroom has been a fantastic success in terms of delivering a robust, reliable and easy to use package so far.

There have been some poor decisions in what to add, what to support and there's still a lot of features users are clamouring for, but mostly it ought to be regarded as a success story with respect to actual coding.